Person

Dan M Kahan

Legal scholar studying cultural cognition—how group identity shapes risk perception and belief formation.

Why this matters

Kahan explains why more information rarely settles disputes that are really about belonging.

Works

article

Cultural Cognition and Public Policy.

Kahan, Dan M. "Cultural Cognition and Public Policy." *Yale Law & Policy Review* 24 (2006): 149–173.

article

Motivated Reasoning.

Kahan, Dan M. "Motivated Reasoning." *Behavioral and Brain Sciences* (2017).

Related concepts

Concept

Adaptation marks moral life responding to conditions that will not wait—scarcity, violence, scale, displacement. In Before Certainty Arrives, what begins as adaptation can outlive the pressures that first made it necessary. It helps preserve workable coordination under constraint, but can fail when adaptive tools are mistaken for permanent moral truth. It differs from inheritance because adaptation names responsive change; inheritance names what gets carried forward after conditions shift. It differs from drift because adaptation is active response; drift is gradual decoupling while machinery still runs.

Concept

Interpretation

Interpretation names the ongoing work of deciding what something means enough to coordinate on. It becomes important whenever shared action depends on more than immediate perception—across time, distance, conflict, or institutional scale. It helps preserve continuity between experience and obligation, but can fail when interpretation hardens into category and stops tracking changing conditions. In the authority arc, sacred authority compresses interpretation while writing and law later externalize it so disputes can be settled without shared presence. It differs from private understanding because interpretation must be able to coordinate judgment or contest authority in shared space; it differs from meaning because interpretation is the active reconstruction, not only what gets stabilized.

Related books

Book

After Certainty

How to Live and Judge When Understanding is not Enough

How to live and judge once explanation reaches its limits. The practice volume in a series on formation, stabilization, and tension—judgment, responsibility, and participation without replacement frameworks.

Book

How Meaning Moves

Signal, Compression, Restraint, and the Pace of Understanding

A concise tour of how meaning travels through language, systems, and relationships, and why restraint is often the difference between noise and connection.